The historian David Starkey is about to launch a new series on Channel 4, Henry VIII: Mind of a Tyrant, filmed to mark the 500th anniversary of the Tudor monarch's accession to the throne in 1509. A brilliant presenter, Starkey always speaks in clear soundbites, making history accessible to the masses. But in an interview published in the current issue of the Radio Times, he reveals a deeply misogynist view of the past and of his fellow women historians.

Starkey claims: "One of the great problems has been that Henry, in a sense, has been absorbed by his wives. Which is bizarre. But it's what you expect from feminised history, the fact that so many of the writers who write about this are women and so much of their audience is a female audience. Unhappy marriages are big box office. We're trying to say, 'Hang on a minute, Henry is centre stage.' This is Henry – wives complicate the story of Henry. This is his development, his psychology and, above all, why he matters."

Further, when talking to a Daily Telegraph reporter, Starkey adds that modern attempts to paint many women in history as "power players" was to falsify the facts. "If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes, it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify."

One of the criticisms of "malestream history", as it was called in the 1970s by a chorus of feminist voices, was that it centred on white men's lives and white men's activities in the public sphere in political, economic, intellectual, literary and artistic circles. This is what "history" meant for many people at that time. As feminist historians began to research the hidden history of women in the past, the focus broadened to include studies where women might be found, not only in the private sphere of the family, but also in the public sphere of the labour market, political movements, philanthropy, associations or higher education.

As this new women's history developed, various concepts such as "the political world" were challenged and refined. In particular, women historians argued that the definition of the public sphere of politics should be extended to include the "private" world of family connections and friendship networks. In these various locations, political ideas could be discussed and new social practices formed. In other words, there was a women's broader political culture, where a woman's own place within an influential or political family, as well as her proximity to powerful men, meant that she was often a player in various decisions or intrigues.

For Starkey to argue that a proper study of Henry VIII should focus just on him, without any reference to any of his wives, is nonsense. Henry's exercise of political power and some of his major policy decisions, such as the break with Roman Catholicism, were intimately tied to the various women in his life and their particular influence.

But more than this, Starkey's insistence that women historians researching women in the past turn history into a soap opera is incredibly arrogant. There are a number of women historians who do not want to study white, male elites, just as there are a number of distinguished women historians who have written about Henry VIII or his wives – such as Antonia Fraser and Alison Weir. Starkey is merely pandering to a sexist notion of public history that is endlessly presented on our TV screens by middle-aged, white-haired men in dark suits. Would his female equivalent in age, hair colour and clothes be given his job? No. And that is part of the problem.